On Friday 27 February, Big Think partner PwC hosted its second global webcast focused on the question, ‘What would you do if you were not afraid?’ The webcast was part of ‘Aspire to Lead: The PwC Women’s...

Designers of the new federal system for sending emergency alerts to our cell phones devoted at lot attention to setting up the technical aspects, but not enough to figuring out what the messages should say....

Is Psychiatry Out of Touch with Science?

In an excerpt from Gary Greenberg's book, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry, the author argues that psychiatry is out of touch with today's science. He writes:

In the four revision of the [American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (D.S.M.)] since 1980, diagnoses have appeared and disappeared, and symptom lists have been tweaked and rejiggered with troubling regularity, generally after debate that seems more suited to the floors of Congress than the halls of science. The inevitable and public chaos—diagnostic epidemics, prescription-drug fads, patients labelled and relabelled—has only deepened psychiatry’s inferiority complex. But it’s not entirely clear that psychiatrists want a solution to the problem...